Pudding Beach Cups

Because we used instant, no cook pudding mix Big Brother could do most of the work himself and was pretty proud of his work at the end. (It also meant they were a little brighter and a little less smoothly assembled than if I had made them, but the point was for him to be hands on with this special treat.)

Before cooking we read a new find from our library, Beach by Elisha Cooper. The book tells the story of a day at the beach from morning to night through simple watercolors and a variety of little pictures. It reminded us of our day trip to the beach a few weeks before, which is what kicked off ocean week to begin with.

The ingredients included one small box of instant vanilla pudding mix, 2 cups cold milk, light blue food coloring, 4 graham crackers, some clear cups, a handful of cocktail umbrellas, and a small bag of chocolate "shell" candies.

I set out the ingredients and talked Big Brother through the directions. He did as much as he could on his own, including open the box and dump the pudding mix into a large bowl. As I had pre-poured the milk, he was able to add that himself too.

Whoops! As always cooking with kids can get messy . . .

After he added the milk he used a whisk to mix the pudding for about 1 minute. He then added in some of the food coloring. He started out with a little bit, but it wasn't quite the right color so he added more. It turned out to be a lot more, so these were a lot brighter than we had planned on!

He whisked the pudding and then we set it aside to set up for about 5 minutes.

While it was setting up, we put 4 graham crackers into a plastic bag and he pounded them with our meat tenderizer until we had a bag of crumbs (aka sand.)

He spooned the pudding, which we were now calling the water, into five cups. (I helped clean up the sides a little bit.) Depending on your cup size you could make smaller ones and have more servings too.

Afterwards he sprinkled some "sand" on to the top of each cup.

The boys had been given these chocolate shells earlier this summer by my dad, and we still had some. They made a perfect accent to our beach cups. But gummy fish would also be cute.

Finally we added some beach umbrellas to each cup, and they were complete!